Lots of them. Here are a few pulled from my Goodreads list, in no particular order

His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman - these are kids books, but when I reread them recently I realized that they had a profound effect on my adolescent mind.

Neal Stephenson - his science fiction gave me a taste of what the world could be.

Born to Run by Christopher McDougall - It's kind of silly, but a few years ago this book planted the seeds that got me running -- and not just running but running almost daily and LOVING it. Now I'm coming up on thirty with my fitness level tracking upwards. It's amazing.

Deep Economy by Bill McKibben

That's not the point.

The problems with ideas like this boil down to two major points:
1) It's your tool, and you shouldn't have to dial up a DRM server every time you want to use it.
2) Even if you disregard such anarcho-handyman ideals it's still utterly unenforceable. There are plans galore for increasingly high-quality DIY CNC and 3D printing machines on the internet, and if I build one in my garage I'm sure as hell not going to make it dial into a DRM server. Doing that would be a lot of extra work and amount to crippling my own creation. Guess what? Neither will criminals building their own devices like this to mass-produce knockoffs.

All a system like this does is make lawyers and executives warm-and-fuzzy. All the while inconveniencing legitimate users, not even fazing criminals, and making a few new criminals out of people who choose to bypass the system so that could...say...operate such a device without the need for an internet connection.

The assignee of this patent is "The Invention Science Fund I, LLC." Sounds like a zany R&D lab, right?

Wrong.

They appear to be a law firm specializing in patent law. I smell an up-and-coming patent troll.

I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?

I can't think of many good reasons that they would look at customers coming in and buying assloads of their merchandise and say "NO! Get out of here and don't buy stuff from us ever again!"

But 'are' you 'qualified' to 'use' so many 'scare quotes?'

You forgot to mention the overabundance of full suspensions, too. Those things are ridiculous for city riding.

I've seen the clientele of Walmart, I promise you that statistically speaking NONE of them are hardcore downhill mountain bikers.

They're just [fat/dumb]asses who buy full suspensions because they look cool, then think bikes suck because that suspension eats up so much of their power bouncing around.

Why does tethering make it worth more? Stop drinking the Kool-Aid and get it through your thick skull that a bit is a bit, no matter its source.

That said, I appreciate how T-Mobile does it now. You get a finite amount of that sweet, sweet 4G, and then are throttled down (usually to 3G speeds, which are plenty fast for most things IMHO). Once I'm sure they're doing it that way (and not throttling too badly over the 4G limit) I may switch to one of their smaller month-to-month plans, which could potentially save me $5-15/mo

I voted $11-20 because I'm still grandfathered into $20/mo unlimited data on T-Mobile. I was early to the Android party, and locked in that price before all the carriers took up mercilessly gouging us all.

Sure, IE may update less often. It's orders of magnitude more likely to break things when it does, though.

I've been doing web design almost non-stop since 1998, and I don't think I've ever had an update to Firefox or Chrome break the rendering on anything. I've had new versions of IE break countless designs, though. The same goes for their Javascript implementations (with the odd exception of one pet project I made the ill-advised choice of making rely on Gears in Chrome).

Sounds pretty secure, bro. Except that on Android there's a little checkbox in the settings, labelled "allow mock locations."

No. The specific people he listed probably have not added him back and sent him private posts.

That doesn't mean it isn't a thing people do. Personally I've got a few small groups of people that I communicate back and forth with on G+ via private posts. Hell, I've even used it to send private posts to a single person before.

It tailors the recommended section to each person. Maybe you should try harder not to be a person Google thinks will like just a bunch of Lifehacker posts.

I get all manner of interesting things in mine.

Maybe the RIAA should have its assets seized and business halted for a year. See how they like it.